Many things we think are true are not. Together we can fix that. @SteveDarden

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KNOWOSPHERE: can MOOCS make a difference?

I think Andy Revkin's KNOWOSPHERE is a useful framing of one of the core development challenges. 18 months ago Andy wrote about how even South African students couldn't access higher education. SA is relatively rich compared to many neighbors.

I also think Tyler Cowen's “Average is Over” is fundamentally correct. So how are the Bottom Billion going to find jobs that lead out of the bottom? The only scalable, affordable pathway I've been able to think of are MOOCS. Remember that the top 72 students in the first Stanford online AI class were NOT Stanford students!

…To me, there is nothing more tragic than seeing young people who are already eager to learn denied that chance — whether through inequity created by poverty or simply, as in this case, the lack of infrastructure. (I had that same feeling when I first saw photos of kids, lacking electricity in their slum dwellings, doing homework under the lights in an airport parking lot in Guinea.)

From South Asia through much of the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa, it’d be impossible to build schools or train teachers fast enough to keep up with the “youth bulge” that has given humanity more than a billion teenagers either to nurture or tame — the difference depending largely on access to education beyond elementary grades.

But in these same places, explosive expansion in mobile phone subscriptions and fast-dropping costs for smart phones provide the architecture for a partial end run around such bottlenecks. That’s why the decision by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to open more courses to online users is probably just a taste of what’s to come. [Stanford University has had remarkable outcomes, as well.]

What’s needed now is the educational equivalent to Paul Polak’s work fostering progress in rural agrarian communities in poor places. His mantra is “design for the other 90 percent.”

Universities in the developed world seeking a place (and a business model) in a century in which knowledge is no longer cached in ivory towers would do well to find ways to “educate for the other 90 percent.”

So here's the question: what do we have to do to enable Nigeria to Somalia to leverage all those free MOOCS into useful education and brainwork jobs? Just a smartphone is not sufficient. We are starting to see some enabling models in the rich world — WGU Western Governors University is great example. Check it out, how could it be adapted to South Africa?